Johan Van de Wauw
Developing monitoring solutions using fiber optic cables at Fluves and Marlinks during the day and FOSDEM staff member at night.
Sessions
Fluves and Marlinks are two sister companies in Ghent focusing on monitoring water & energy infrastucture, both onshore and offshore mostly using fiber optic sensing.
I want to tell the story of how our infrastructure grow with the company, from our first ansible playbook almost 9 years ago to the company we are now with 30 employees and deployments at different critical infrastructure sites all around the world, and under scrutiny of audits such as ISO 27001.
Due to the high volume of data we gather (acoustic sensing can generate terabytes of data per day) and our own interests, we have been self-hosting most of our work, in a time before data sovereignty was a thing and the cloud was still all the hype.
Most of our own development is done in Python, deployments are done using Ansible and I'll touch which open source tools worked for us (amongst other proxmox, postgres, gitea, prometheus, grafana, restic) and how we deploy them, which problems we faced and solved and which ones we didn't.
Even though we are not an open source company, we have contributed back patches to many of the tools we use, and we maintain a number of libraries.
The session is meant to be highly interactive. I want to mention which difficulties we are facing, such as stricter rules on remote access, and hope to hear how others are handling this.